When I was at school we all had to use fountain pens - and the brand most people used (parker??) had cartridges that had an “extra” bit of ink in the bottom of the cartridge. When you ran out of ink you opened the pen up, tapped the end of the cartridge and some extra/ spare ink was released.

Seems pretty daft in retrospect.

Feel free to weigh in on this and general fountain pen chat - I remember the lefties getting a pretty raw deal from the mandatory fountain pen rule

when i first started primary school, you had to use a fountain pen, and you weren’t allowed to use one with cartridges - you HAD to buy a bottle of ink and try and use a pen that sucked it up into the pen

what an absolute crock of shit. everyone just gave up and moved on to cartridges straight away.

We used to do hand-writing practice like something out of the 19th century with blotting paper and everything. Given that everyone uses computers these days it was a complete waste of time. Could have been learning computer programming or Mandarin instead

At my primary school you had to use a pencil until you “graduated” to fountain pen, Every piece of paper you used for doing work on had to have a “border” round the edges of joined up cs or Ws or whatever

They also insisted on a particular style of handwriting called italics.